Sands of MAUI: Issue #175

Welcome to the Sands of MAUI—newsletter-style issues dedicated to bringing together the latest .NET MAUI content relevant to developers.

A particle of sand—tiny and innocuous. But put a lot of sand particles together and we have something big—a force to reckon with. It is the smallest grains of sand that often add up to form massive beaches, dunes and deserts.

.NET developers are excited with the reality of .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI)—the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform developer technology stack. With stable tooling and a rich ecosystem, .NET MAUI empowers developers to build native cross-platform apps for mobile/desktop from single shared codebase, while inviting web technologies in the mix.

While it may take a long flight to reach the sands of MAUI island, developer excitement around .NET MAUI is quite palpable with all the created content. Like the grains of sand, every piece of news/article/documentation/video/tutorial/livestream contributes toward developer experiences in .NET MAUI and we grow a community/ecosystem willing to learn and help.

Sands of MAUI is a humble attempt to collect all the .NET MAUI awesomeness in one place. Here’s what is noteworthy for the week of February 17, 2025:

Splash Screens in .NET MAUI

.NET MAUI is built to enable .NET developers to create cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, with deep platform integrations, native UI and hybrid web experiences. Modern apps often serve demanding users—they cannot be kept waiting for too long, need to be kept informed and need wow factors to stay engaged.

The app splash screen can help. It is the proverbial first impression of the app to users. Splash screens present an opportunity to introduce the app—showcase the app’s name, logo and branding colors. This is important, and Leomaris Reyes wrote up an article to help—splash screens in .NET MAUI.

The app splash screen is not only the first impression—it is the perfect distraction for users, while the app loads up all the necessary processes/resources to start working. Leomaris starts with the basics of how developers can add splash screens in .NET MAUI. Thankfully, much of the difficult cross-platform plumbing is already taken care of for developers.

With .NET MAUI, developers can set the app splash screen one time in project .csproj—no need for separate images for each target platform. There is some smart image resizing happening behind .NET MAUI builds. SVGs work best for scaling the base image up or down based on platform specific needs for splash screens. Leomaris talks through how .NET MAUI developers can work with image base sizes for optimal splash screens across platforms, as well as some platform-specific configurations for iOS/Android.

Splash screen management can get tricky for cross-platform apps—another area where .NET MAUI tries to help out developers with consistent resized rendering across device form factors. All developers have to do is make a good first impression with apps—and wow the user to keep them engaged.

Telerik Release

.NET MAUI is the evolution of modern .NET cross-platform development stack, allowing developers to reach mobile and desktop form factors from a single shared codebase. Modern .NET apps are, however, inherently complicated, and developers could use all the UI tooling toward increased productivity—Progress Telerik UI can help. It is time to start off the year strong—say hello to Telerik and Kendo UI 2025 Q1 release.

Telerik UI can help developers building modern .NET apps faster—professionally engineered UI components shine with consistent rendering, fine-tuned performance and dependability with documentation/support. The 2025 Q1 release is here, bringing powerful updates that continue to enhance the design-to-development workflows, modernize legacy projects, accelerate app development and deliver rich, data-driven experiences. With new Building Blocks, Generative AI integrations, UI for modernization, feature-rich adaptive existing components and a unified consistent licensing mechanism, developers should be enabled to find UI-powered solutions to emerging problems.

GraphQL with .NET

Modern .NET is powerful, open-source, cross-platform and welcoming to all, with mature tooling accompanied by rich ecosystems—and it integrates nicely with other technologies. GraphQL has been steadily growing in popularity, and Héctor Pérez wrote up an article showcasing interoperability—integrating GraphQL into Blazor.

GraphQL is a data query/manipulation language that allows specifying what data is to be retrieved—this is popular for various types of interconnected large data sets. A GraphQL server can process a client query using data from separate sources and present the results in a unified graph. GraphQL is not tied to specific databases or programming languages.

To showcase interoperability, Héctor starts from scratch with a .NET Blazor project and brings in GrapghQLZero service along with a client generator to leverage strongly typed schema from C# to reach models/fake data in GraphQL. Bring in a Telerik Blazor Grid with some dependencies and there is now a nice visual interface with full CRUD operations over GraphQL queries and data—a nice showcase of popular technology with modern .NET and polished UI. Such integrations with GraphQL are also welcome on mobile/desktop through Blazor Hybrid or straight up cross-platform native with .NET MAUI. Modern .NET takes you places.

Smart UI with AI

AI presents a huge opportunity for .NET developers to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI and large/small language models—modern app UI should ease AI integrations. AI is also an opportunity to streamline and automate developer workflows for better productivity. Showing is often better than telling, and so an aging developer took the .NET Conf airwaves to showcase the promise of AI for .NET developers—Smart UI powered by AI.

Smart UI can change the game with AI integrations inside .NET apps—polished UI components can cut down developer plumbing work while talking to AI services. Powered by embedded vector similarity searches, lots of UI can be smarter like dropdowns/comboboxes/grid search and more. The end result is better UX for the user.

Enterprise workflows often need working with documents—smartness in document processing libraries can mean better UX when working with spreadsheets, rich documents or making sense of huge PDF documents. And developer productivity can be augmented with smart coding assistants that go beyond GitHub Copilot—the real value add is deep contextual coding help through integrated Copilot chat agents. While experimental, hopefully the Smart UI components and better coding assistants provide a taste of what the future might hold for .NET developers—cheers to productivity.

UX Crash Course

Modern web, mobile and desktop apps often strive for delightful UX, and beautifully styled UI design is one way to achieve the goal. However, there has traditionally been some friction in the designer-developer handoff workflows. It helps to understand some basic tenets of good UX and designing software. Thankfully, experts can break down knowledge barriers, and Kathryn Grayson Nanz wrote up another UX Crash Course article—running critiques.

There are some key differences between a pitch and a critique. A pitch is intended to get the approval of stakeholders on what has been created, perhaps with some suggestions. Contrasting that, a critique is an invitation for others with different perspectives and life experiences to help poke holes in a design and find places for improvement—it’s an opportunity to find what’s working and what isn’t. While critiques can be run casually, Kathryn points to some popular critique frameworks that provide more structure. While all this is meant for design/UX workflows, some lessons are easily relatable to other areas of life in general.

That’s it for now.

We’ll see you next week with more awesome content relevant to .NET MAUI.

Cheers, developers!